Curbing the Costs of Unstructured Data

While structured data has doubled over the past decade,
growth in unstructured data has exploded along with social media, video, apps
and other new technologies we use daily. In fact, unstructured data has been
growing rapidly over the past decade, that 85% of data is expected to be
unstructured this year, according to a recent Storage
Newsletter article.

While enterprises want to make use of this data quickly,
much of this unstructured data is accessed for only a brief window of time when
it is new. It’s costly to keep cool data on primary storage, so enterprises need
an online archive that can keep data available for possible data mining, while
minimizing the expense of storing large volumes of mostly cold data. The trouble
is, the lack of visibility into storage means that most enterprises do not know
what data is cold and can be moved, and the complexity of data migration has
made it it a challenge to get data from one system to another. Indeed, Gartner notes
that, “For many
organizations, data volumes have grown so large that it is difficult to
migrate, integrate, share, govern and analyze; thus maximizing the full value
of the data.”

DataSphere helps companies looking to overcome the
challenges of data gravity by deploying an online archive. DataSphere
seamlessly integrates with cloud providers, including, S3, Swift, Azure, as
well as on premise object stores. IT admins can create policies in DataSphere
that automatically move inactive data (for example, data that has not been
accessed in the last 30 days) to cloud/object storage. Primary Data delivers
these capabilities through data virtualization, which Gartner
notes is growing in adoption and “affords
the opportunity for data and analytics manager to apply new metadata-based integration
points and data management approaches.”

Importantly, DataSphere moves data non-disruptively, with
awareness of neighboring applications. This protects business continuity, while
freeing IT to focus on other value added tasks. In addition, data residing in
cloud/object storage continues to be visible as files within DataSphere’s
global dataspace. This means that files can be retrieved from object/cloud
storage if they ever become active and placed on storage that makes the most
sense for the application, an essential feature of an online archive. Best of all, because data is retrieved as
files, IT doesn’t have to worry about modifying applications to work with the
cloud.

Increasing adoption of data mining and business intelligence
make it critical for enterprises to develop a method for cost effectively
storing infrequently accessed data while retaining the ability to access it. Unstructured
data is only expected to continue to grow as enterprises monetize the value of
data from an increasingly wide variety of data sources, including the Internet
of Things and mobile devices. DataSphere
helps enterprises seamlessly implement an active archive for automated data
lifecycle management, using existing storage assets to make it easy to keep up
with unstructured data growth.